Chapter 5
Giant Black Holes and the Fate of the Universe

As long as stellar black holes were the only kind of black holes for which
science could find even indirect evidence, the universe seemed a far less
scary place than it does today. After all, stellar black holes did not
appear to pose any major short- or long-term danger to the universe as a
whole or to the existence of life within it. True, when a giant star
collapses to form a black hole, any living things inhabiting the planets
or moons of that solar system will first be fried and then frozen. No life
of any kind will be able to survive for very long. However, these lethal
effects would remain localized to that system. This is because the
distances separating most stars are immense—about four to seven
light-years, or 24 trillion to 42 trillion miles. The gravitational
effects and radiation of even the most massive stellar black hole could be
felt over only a small fraction of such distances. Therefore, this kind of
black hole would pose no credible threat to neighboring stars, their
planets, and any life forms they might harbor.

When one considers the larger scheme of things, however, such safety zones
become illusory and ultimately useless. Scientists now know that the
danger
posed by black holes increases significantly in areas of space where many
large stars lie very close together (on the order of only a few
light-weeks, light-days, or even light-hours apart). In such an
environment, several neighboring giant stars can collapse into black holes
over time. As these superdense objects drift and meander, some will merge,
producing more massive bodies with stronger gravities.

Finally, one very massive black hole will dominate the scene. It will
continue to draw in clouds of gas, stars, planets, smaller black holes,
and other materials floating in its cluttered cosmic neighborhood; and
over the course of millions and billions of years, it will grow still more
massive. Indeed, it will become a sort of cosmic monster with an
insatiable appetite. Only recently have astronomers come to the unsettling
realization that such giant, or supermassive, black holes not only exist,
they may well play a major role in the ongoing evolution and ultimate fate
of the universe and everything in it.

This drawing depicts a black hole wreaking havoc at the center of a
galaxy. Most or all galaxies may harbor such objects
.

Midsized Black Holes

First, it is important to determine just how massive a black hole must be
to qualify as a giant. The standard stellar black holes that scientists
believe exist in some binary star systems are mostly in the range of about
eight to twenty, and occasionally up to about fifty, solar masses. By
earthly and human standards, these are very massive objects to be sure.
But in the last few years,
evidence has been found for the existence of much more substantial black
holes.

These larger black holes fall into two broad
categories—intermediate, or midsized, holes, and supermassive, or
giant, holes. Since the early 1970s, astronomers had speculated about the
possibility of midsized black holes, which they theorized would contain
from a few hundred to several tens of thousands of solar masses. It was
clear that such objects would most likely form in regions of densely
packed stars and gas clouds; after all, the holes would have to have a lot
of matter to feed on to grow so large. One such crowded region is a
globular cluster, of which the Milky Way contains several hundred. Isaac
Asimov describes globular clusters as stellar groups in which

some tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars are
clustered together in a well-packed sphere. Here in our own neighborhood
of the universe, stars are separated by an average distance of about 5
light-years. At the center of a globular cluster, they may be separated
by an average distance of½ light-year. A given volume of space in
a globular cluster might include 1,000 times as many stars as that same
volume in our own neighborhood.
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Astronomers examined several globular clusters in the 1970s and found that
they did emit high doses of X rays, as the likely black hole candidate Cyg
X-1 did. However, no concrete evidence for midsized black holes in these
star groups surfaced until 2002. Late that year, a team led by Roeland Van
Der Marel at the Space Telescope Institute found two midsized black holes.
One, possessing about four thousand solar masses, is in M15, a globular
cluster in the Milky Way. The other resides in G1, a globular cluster in
the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, and has roughly twenty thousand solar
masses. In an interview following the

The globular cluster M15, located about thirty-three thousand
light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, appears to have a
large black hole in its center
.

discovery, Luis Ho, one of the team members, exclaimed:
"It's very exciting to finally find compelling evidence that
nature knows how to make these strange beasts."
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Early in 2003, another research team, this one led by Jon Miller at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, discovered two more midsized
black holes. Situated in a spiral galaxy designated NGC 1313, lying at a
distance of 10 million light-years from Earth, they each contain several
hundred solar masses.

Something Frightening in the Core

Proof for the existence of members of the other broad category of
larger-than-stellar black holes—the supermassive ones—has
also begun to emerge in recent years. These giants always appear to
inhabit the centers, or cores, of galaxies, so it has become common to
refer to them as "galactic black holes." The reasons that it
took so long to verify their existence are fairly simple. First, the cores
of galaxies are extremely far away; even the center of our own Milky Way
lies at the considerable distance of about
twenty-six thousand light-years. Second, the galactic cores are also
generally blocked from easy viewing by dense layers of gases, dust, and
other cosmic debris.

In spite of these obstacles, astronomers persevered. Over the years, new
and larger telescopes, along with more sophisticated detection equipment,
revealed more and more information about the Milky Way's core.
There, it became clear, many huge stars lie very close together. Some of
them are as large as 120 or more times the size of the Sun, and many of
them float among the expanding and often overlapping gaseous remnants of
many prior supernovas. "Like silken drapes blown in the
wind," writes noted science writer Robert Zimmerman,

the erupting waves of gas from scores of supernovas sweep through an
inner region approximately 350 light-years across, filling space like
froth and geysers. Here supergiant stars—many times more massive
than the sun and rare elsewhere in the galaxy—number in the
hundreds.

A Hubble Space Telescope photo of the galaxy NGC 4414. Both it and
the Milky Way, which it resembles, likely contain giant black holes
.

And within those 350 light-years are three of the galaxy's
densest and most massive star clusters, surrounded by millions of
additional stars. So packed is this core that if the solar system were
located there, a handful of stars [in addition to the sun] would float
among the planets.
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More ominously, astronomers also discovered something dark, monstrous, and
frightening in the crowded galactic core. Almost all stars and other
matter there are sweeping very rapidly around an extremely massive object.
The first hints that something unusual lay in the center of our galaxy
came in the 1950s. Radio telescopes, huge bowl-shaped antennas that gather
and record radio waves from outer space, showed that a powerful source of
these waves lies in the galactic core. These early images were crude and
inconclusive. And thanks to the masses of gases and dust obscuring the
core, visual images showed nothing.

Imitating Master Yoda

It took the development of more advanced radio telescopes in ensuing
decades to begin to unravel the mystery of the Milky Way's core. In
the mid-1970s, radio images revealed three distinct nonstellar objects in
the core. Two, which looked like hazy, cloudlike patches, were dubbed
Sagittarius East and Sagittarius West (after Sagittarius, the archer, the
constellation in which the core is situated in Earth's night sky).
The third object, a pointlike, very powerful radio-wave source lying in
the galaxy's very center, received the name Sagittarius A*
(pronounced A-star).

For a long time, astronomers were puzzled by Sagittarius A*. It is clearly
too energetic and hot to be an ordinary star. Indeed, studies reveal that
it is hotter than any other object in the Milky Way. In the 1980s and
early 1990s, more sophisticated images of the core were taken using
infrared telescopes, which can see through most of the layers of gases and
dust.
These showed huge filaments of gases swirling around Sagittarius A*. Even
more detail was revealed in 1997 by German astronomers Andrea Eckart and
Reinhard Genzel, who announced that they had mapped the frenzied motions
of the seventy stars closest to the core's central object.
According to Zimmerman:

They found that many of the stars were streaking across the sky at
tremendous speeds, and that the closer to Sagittarius A* the stars were,
the faster they moved. Stars at distances of more than half a light-year
traveled at less than 100 miles per second. Closer in, the speeds
increased to more than 500 miles per second, and the closest star to
Sagittarius A*, dubbed S1, also had the fastest velocity, estimated at
almost 900 miles per second. Furthermore, Eckart and Genzel found that
the 100 nearest stars seemed to be moving in a generally clockwise
direction, opposite to the rotation of the rest of the galaxy. This
suggests that they were part of a large torus [doughnut-shaped
structure] of stars orbiting a single invisible point. At the center of
this whirling collection of stars was the radio source Sagittarius A*,
which unlike any other star in the sky has no apparent proper [visible]
motion.
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Members of the scientific community are now nearly unanimous in their
belief that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole. As for just how
massive it is, numerous estimates appeared in the 1990s, the most common
being 2.6 million solar masses. In October 2002, however, the results of a
study by Rainer Schödel, of Germany's Max Planck Institute
for Extraterrestrial Physics, showed a larger mass for the giant black
hole—3.7 million times that of the Sun.

To measure the mass of Sagittarius A*, the scientists observed the speeds
at which matter is orbiting it and determined how massive the central
object
would have to be to produce these movements. "In the same way that
Master Yoda and his disciples [in the
Star Wars
series] saw through an attempt to wipe a planet from the Jedi archives
[by detecting the telltale signs of the planet's gravity],"
William Keel quips, "astronomers can discern the existence of this
object."
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The Chicken or the Egg?

Having already drawn in and consumed more than 3 million stars,
Sagittarius A* is certainly far more massive than stellar and midsized
black holes (not to mention mini–black holes). Yet mounting
evidence suggests that this giant's growth cycle is far from
finished. As Keel points out, "Even at a mass of 3 million suns,
this black hole proves quite modest by the standards of other
galaxies."
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Indeed, astronomers have intensified their studies of galactic cores and
continue to discover truly enormous supermassive black holes in many
distant galaxies. The nearby Andromeda galaxy, for instance, harbors a
30-million-solar-mass black hole in its core. A galaxy named NGC 4486B has
a central black hole measuring about 500 million solar masses, and the
core of a galaxy designated NGC 4261 features a stupendous object of some
1.2 billion solar masses. This suggests that there may be no physical
limit to the size of a supermassive black hole.

Also, the fact that these giants seem to be integral features of galaxies
and that they are eating their way through the galactic cores is surely
significant. It now appears certain that supermassive galactic black holes
must strongly affect the structure, evolution, and ultimate fate of
galaxies. Says science writer Steve Nadis, "New evidence strongly
suggests a much more intimate connection than astronomers ever thought
possible between galaxies and the supermassive black holes that dominate
their cores."
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But the nature of this grand cosmic connection is for the moment
problematic for scientists. Central to

Sagittarius A* Rips a Star Apart

In this excerpt from an article in the October 2001 issue of
Astronomy
magazine, science writer Robert Zimmerman describes the possible
origins of Sagittarius East. It is now believed to be the remnants of an
unusual supernova created by the immense gravitational effects of the
black hole Sagittarius A*.

Sagittarius East is now believed to be a large bubble, possibly one of
the largest supernova remnants known, that formed fewer than 100,000
years ago and maybe as recently as 10,000 years ago. Although it
engulfs Sagittarius West [a cloudlike region nearby] and Sagittarius
A*, it lies mostly behind both. Astronomers think that the energy
required to punch out this shell of gas in such a dense region would
have to be as much as 50 times greater than the most powerful
supernova explosion. What could have produced this much energy still
puzzles astronomers. Some theorize that Sagittarius East was created
when a star approached within 50 million miles of the central black
hole and was torn apart by the strong gravity.

At the center of this mass of gaseous clouds lies Sagittarius A*,
which astronomers believe to be a giant black hole
.

the present debate on the topic is a variation of the old "chicken
or the egg" question, in this case, Which came first, galaxies or
giant black holes? Some astronomers think that galaxies and their central
black holes form from the "outside in." In other words,
swirling masses of gases and dust condense to form spinning galaxies of
stars, and over time some of the giant stars in the core collapse into
black holes, which in turn merge to become one really massive black hole.

In contrast, others argue for the "inside out" hypothesis.
In this version, as Asimov says, "The black hole may have come
first and then served as a 'seed,' gathering stars about
itself as super-accretion disks that become clusters and galaxies."
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As for where these initial seed black holes came from, no one knows. They
may have been created somehow in the Big Bang along with mini–black
holes.

Whichever came first—galaxies or large black holes—the two
seem to grow and develop together in step, so to speak. Late in 2000,
astronomer Michael Merrifield and his colleagues at the University of
Nottingham, in England, found a telling correlation between the age of
galaxies and the masses of the supermassive black holes at their cores.
Simply put, the older the galaxy, the more massive its central hole.
"We're measuring the time scale over which black holes
grow," Merrifield explains, "and it appears to be comparable
to the age of the host galaxies. So they really are developing
together."
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This new finding raises an important question. If giant black holes
continue to grow at the expense of their host galaxies, why do astronomers
not see some galaxies in their death throes, almost totally absorbed by
the cosmic monsters within? The most obvious answer is that the universe
is not yet old enough. Indeed, present-day humans probably exist at a time
in the life cycle of the universe when most galactic black holes are still
relative youngsters possessing

Stars in the center of the galaxy called M87 are tightly packed and
moving very fast, suggesting they are orbiting a massive black hole
.

from a few million to a few billion solar masses. According to this view,
if humans could somehow travel far ahead in time, they would see many
galactic black holes with tens and hundreds of billions of solar masses
devouring the last remains of their parent galaxies.

The Oscillating Universe

If this scenario is correct, what does the awesome process of giant black
holes consuming entire galaxies mean for the future of the universe and
for humans and any other intelligent beings that may exist in the vast
reaches of space? First, the process will take a long time, perhaps
thirty, fifty, or even hundreds of billions of years or more. So most
galaxies and intelligent civilizations are not in any immediate danger.
Eventually, though, Sagittarius A* will likely swallow up all the normal
matter surrounding it, including the Sun and its planets. After its
humongous meal, this bloated black hole may then float through space until
it encounters other giant holes that have already devoured their own
former
galaxies. And relentless gravity will inevitably cause these phenomenally
massive objects to move ever closer to one another and merge in an embrace
of self-annihilation.

Searching for a Definite Beginning

In this excerpt from his book
Black Holes
, scientist John Taylor points out that the concept that the present
universe developed from a black hole containing the remnants of a prior
universe is difficult for humans to comprehend because it does not
define the beginning of the process.

The hardest question of all to answer is where did our universe come
from? If we reply that it came from somewhere else, brought to its
present state by the laws of physics, we need only add that somewhere
else, filled with whatever was in it before it formed us and our
material surroundings, to our present world. We then ask again, where
did that new totality come from? Any definite answer to our first
question is the wrong one, since it would lead us to an infinite chain
of similar questions…. But we could try to find from what our
world, as we know it today, arose. We might do so by conjecturing that
our present universe sprang into being from the final stage of
collapse in a spinning black hole in a different universe, bubbling
out of the black hole's center…. That might or might not
fit with experimental facts if we looked for them carefully enough,
but it would still beg the question, since we would then have to
explain where the previous universe came from.

Carrying this possible sequence of future events even further, after
unknown numbers of eons all of the galactic black holes—together
containing all the former matter in the universe—might merge into
one huge monster of a black hole. The fate of this bizarre cosmic creature
can only be guessed. But some astronomers postulate that this ultimate end
of the present universe will somehow give rise to the birth of a new one.
Perhaps there will be a new Big Bang, in which immense quantities of
matter rush outward from a central point and slowly coalesce into stars,
galaxies, planets, and so forth. Logically, in this new universe new black
holes will form. And
in time, these will slowly but steadily begin a new cycle of growth and
merger. Astronomers call this theoretical situation in which all matter
repeatedly contracts and rebounds the "oscillating
universe."

It is only natural to wonder about what will happen to humanity in the
ultimate cosmic crunch, when all matter in the present universe is
incorporated into one or more titanic black holes. However, it is highly
unlikely that human beings, at least in their present form, will exist
billions of years from now. If our species is not long since extinct by
that time, it will have undergone profound physical and mental changes,
enough to be totally unrecognizable to people alive today. Still, it is at
least possible that our descendants, in whatever form, will be around to
witness the climactic ending of what will become essentially an
all-black-hole universe. Could they survive the final crunch? John Taylor
gives this thought-provoking answer:

The fate of the physical universe is catastrophic…. It is either
to be crushed into its fundamental constituents, as far as possible, to
make a universal black hole, or it is to be slowly absorbed by local
black holes, again to be crushed out of existence as we know it….
At such an end, [we would surely face physical death, so] we could only
appeal to our souls, if they exist, to preserve us…. It could
only be if the universe bounces back again after its collapse that these
separated souls have any chance of returning…. There is very
little evidence of such a bounce being able to occur, but if it does,
only then can one expect any form of immortality.
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About this 'inside-out' concept. Our spiral galaxy which in 1880's discovered to unstable because of 'drawing in' problem leads to the concept of black holes consuming this material. I think it would be more helpful to follow H Arp's lead and consider that the material is contributing to gestation of an Active Galactic Nucleus.
Why are the oldest forms (globular clusters) the farthest away? AND still stable enough to hold their round shape! Why are spiral galaxies a failed globe? Does the 2nd Law stand? If spiral galaxies consume enough would they not reach the point of inflation (anistrophically)?
We see this in both intensely magnetically confined hot plasma (2 M Kelvin) and super cold ( close to Zero Kelvin) where both have an oblate shape which upon release becomes a sphere.
What is NGC 7257 really doing?